Timing

Chair

09:00 – 09:15

Professor Terry Flew (USYD)

09:15 – 10:00

Professor Kate Crawford (USC Annenberg)

Ground Truth & Generative AI

We are living in a period of rapid acceleration for generative AI, where large language and text-to-image diffusion models are being deployed in a multitude of everyday contexts. From ChatGPT’s training set of hundreds of billions of words to LAION-5B’s corpus of almost 6 billion image-text pairs, these vast datasets – scraped from the internet and treated as “ground truth” – play a critical role in shaping the epistemic boundaries that govern machine learning models. Yet training data is beset with complex social, political, and epistemological challenges. What happens when data is stripped of context, meaning, and provenance? How does training data limit what and how machine learning systems interpret the world? And most importantly, what forms of power do these approaches enhance and enable? This lecture is an invitation to reflect on the epistemic foundations of generative AI, and to consider the wide-ranging impacts of the current generative turn.

Professor Terry Flew (USYD)

10:00 – 10:30

AHRC Commissioner Lorraine Finlay

Why Ethical AI should Promote Human Rights.

AI promises to improve efficiency and deliver expeditious outcomes. However when AI is integrated into government decision making without safeguards, there can be adverse outcomes for all Australians. Listen to Human Rights Commissioner, Lorraine Finlay, speak on ethical AI and why it should aim to protect and promote human rights.

Professor Terry Flew (USYD)

11:00 – 11:30

Professor Johanna Weaver (ANU)
& Dr Joanne Gray (USYD)

Policy and Governance Challenges of AI

11:30 – 12:00

Dr Justine Humphry (USYD)
& Dr Chris Chesher (USYD)

Anticipating distrust: the promotion and experience of service robots in restaurants

In the context of what some have referred to as a crisis of societal trust in relation to emerging digital technologies, this paper explores how distrust is anticipated and negotiated in the promotion and experience of service robots in restaurants. Robots are associated with ambivalent meanings in the popular imagination – as cute companions or as social threats. While robots are only gradually appearing in everyday life, they have recently begun to materialise in sites such as restaurants, cafes, shopping centres and airports. In this paper, we map the dimensions and dynamics of trust/distrust that service robots invoke materially and discursively in their promotion and implementation in restaurant settings. In the first part of this talk, we examine how cultural anxieties about robots are managed in the marketing, publicity and design of service robots by companies such as United Robotics, Pudu Robotics, LG and Keenon. In the second part of the talk, we draw on ethnographic observations of restaurants in Sydney, Tokyo and Kuala Lumpur to analyse how robot waiters were often trusted to perform various kinds of service work in physical and social space.

Dr Joanne Gray
(USYD)

12:00 – 13:00

AI, News, Media and Trust

Professor Terry Flew (USYD)

Mediated Trust and Artificial Intelligence

In this short presentation I will outline the concept of mediated trust, and how it relates to what I term the ‘Three I’s’ of ideas, interests, and institutions engaged with digital technologies. I will argue that, in contrast with the early Internet,  where ideas about digital freedom preceded corporate dominance, Artificial intelligence (AI) is already dominated by a small number of powerful corporate interests. The critical question will be what powers governments seek on behalf of their citizens to regulate AI in the public interest, particularly in a post-globalised world characterised by competing tech nationalisms.

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Professor Catharine Lumby (USYD)

The Fourth Estate and the Fallibility of the Human and the Technological

This paper will explore the current anxieties that attend the use of AI in news and related reporting. I will use my own experience as a young journalist when computers were first introduced into the newsroom and reflect on the relationship between human subjectivity and machine- based learning when it comes to building trust with an audience and the Fourth Estate’s aspirations to objectivity.

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Dr James Meese (RMIT)

The Press as Platform

This paper discusses the news media’s growing adoption of platform-like features and highlights the important of trust during this transition. I go on to offer a short case study exploring the adoption and deployment of recommendation systems across the sector and identify a series of practical challenges that are yet to be resolved.

Associate Professor Fiona Martin
(USYD)

14:00 – 15:00

AI, Education Policy and the Future of Learning  

Professor Kal Gulson (USYD),

Associate Professor Kirsty Kitto (UTS),

Associate Professor Roman Marchant (UTS),

& Associate Professor Chika Anyanwu (USYD)

Professor Terry Flew (USYD)

15:00 – 16:00

Legal and Ethical Challenges of AI

Professor Lyria Bennett Moses (UNSW)

Governance of what? Regulation of Artificial Intelligence, Algorithms and Automation

With artificial intelligence and ‘algorithms’ being rapidly applied across all sectors of society and the economy, there are understandably calls for increased regulation. But where to start? Many proposals for regulation focus too deeply on technical concepts (such as artificial intelligence, algorithms, automated processing, bots, big data, robots, autonomous systems) rather than the values we seek to protect. By starting with what we want to preserve (for example, fairness and accountability) rather than with how we regulate a set of technical practices (for example, ‘artificial intelligence’), we can achieve the same thing without the drawbacks of unnecessary technological specificity and capture more of what is on the technological horizon.

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Professor Kimberlee Weatherall (USYD)

The “Race” to Regulate

The discussion over “regulation of AI” is at an … interesting juncture, with Australia in the midst of a Commonwealth-government led process aiming to identify what, if any changes need to be made to our legal and regulatory system to ensure human and societal interests are protected in the race to extend the use of artificial intelligence and related technologies. Among the many interesting questions and challenges being raised in this discussion, Weatherall is thinking about two in particular. The first is: what changes do emerging technologies and uses of AI and automation bring that require us to perhaps rethink not just the obvious areas of law (privacy, discrimination) but more. And the second is: if we are convinced that problems are emerging, how, within the practical constraints of Australia’s parliamentary democracy and regulatory system, do we address them? If we can’t get to perfect, what would be good enough?

Dr Jonathon Hutchinson
(USYD)

16:00 – 16:15

Professor Terry Flew (USYD)